I have written at length on the relation of words and images in this book, so I won't repeat that here. (See http://writingwithimages.com/?page_id=215.) These are comments, instead, on the book's content.

The Midnight is about a bookish interest in Anglo-Irish ancestry, more than about personal loss. As Marjorie Perloff shows in her chapter on The Midnight in "Unoriginal Genius," Howe's mother and her maternal great-aunt were intimately connected with Irish feminism, independence, theater, and literature. But in The Midnight, as Perloff notes, little of that is evident, and with only the book to go on, the picture of Ireland, and therefore the picture of Howe's family, is quite different.

To me (and this can only be a personal position), the statement that "maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is because my mother brought my up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose" sounds at once pretentious, inappropriate, and unnecessary: most Irish and Anglo-Irish children of her generation know Yeats "like Mother Goose," and it's not enough of an explanation for Howe's motivation. It's the same when she says, speaking of Jack Yeats, that her mother "hung Jack's illustrations and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were windows": this was also common, and for an Irish reader the use of the first name may also be cringe-inducing (pp. 74, 75). Howe gives a similar reason for being interested in "embroiderers, upholsterers," and others: "it's the maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance" (p. 66). For a book about reflection, full of reflections, these cultural references are unhelpfully unreflective.

Even if these displays and constructions of Irish identity seem unobjectionable, they are signs of the book's intellectualism and its distance from its subject. Compare the illustrations and the narrative in Roddy Doyle's Rory and Ita, a much richer meditation on Irishness, family, and visuality. The emotional distance here can be seen as an expressive quality, and I appreciate it for its coldness and academic feel (I can certainly picture Howe traveling from one library to another, reading and photographing books): but I am not at all sure Howe thinks of The Midnight as the intermittent and experimental diary of an academic—and that lack of acknowledgment or awareness detracts decisively from my own willingness to engage with the project. ( )

I am assembling materials for a recurrent return somewhere. Familiar sound textures, deliverances, vagabond quotations, preservations, wilderness shrubs, little resuscitated patterns. Historical or miraculous. Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced. […] perhaps there is the surety that after a silence she will contact him again in bits. Escape may be through that dawning light just filtering through the blinds.

What Susan Howe does here is--on the surface--easily boiled down, shrugged off. But if I learned anything from this book, it's that surfaces matter, for it's on the surface that such messes as lives are hidden. Hidden and therefore accessible.

Mind the hidden

Being hidden is the first necessary step to being revealed. Let's ruffle then, the surfaces, the particulars that complicate and trouble our sleep so.

She has shown me that access to the metaphysical is the requirement of a N E E D. Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.

Not only does Howe have faith in a past (both personal and shared) that can be revealed through words found, words printed on a page, words written in the margin, or pictures, photographs and drawings, but also in each word itself.

Portmanteau for a voyage

For each word has a history. An etymology.

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind … The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought."

And in the poetic portions of this book she gives us these words as if cryptic designs etched on a curtain. It is up to us to find their histories, their linkages.

Ten thousandth truth
Ten thousandth impulse
Do not mince matter
as if tumbling were apt
parable preached in
hedge-sparrow gospel

( )

Very enjoyable, layered, complex, philosophical and pretty. ( )